Friday, August 13, 2010

9/11: He couldn't fly a single-engine aircraft, but was able to fly a Boeing 757?

Hani Hanjour, the aerial acrobat that we were told did an amazing feat of flying by piloting a Boeing 757 into the Pentagon, except ol' Hani couldn't even fly a small, single-engine prop plane.

The official story unfolds something like this. The rather diminutive Hanjour, sometime after take-off, fought his way into the cockpit, and wrestled control of Flight 77 from a 6'4" former Marine combat fighter pilot named Charles Burlingame, a man family members and colleagues say would never have given up his aircraft or the safety of his passengers. After dispatching with the co-pilot as well,Hanjour settled in and turned his attention to the bewildering array of gadgets and devices of a Boeing 757 instrument panel - a panel he was wholly unfamiliar with - in an airplane traveling 500 mph, 7 miles in the air, under the stress of a recently executed hijacking plot. Then, without the help of any ground control or air-traffic controllers providing him information and/or settings, this pilot who could not control a tiny Cessna 3 weeks earlier "would have to very quickly interpret his heading, ground track, altitude, and airspeed information on the displays before he could even figure out where in the world he was, much less where the Pentagon was located in relation to his position." (From the essay 'The Impossibility of Flying Heavy Aircraft Without Training', by Nila Sagadevan, an aeronautical engineer and pilot.. Well worth the time it takes to read.)

From the Ohio/Kentucky border, Hanjour then supposedly turned the plane around, set course for Washigton D.C. hundreds of miles away, and successfully entered the most restricted airspace in the world without eliciting a single military intercept - despite the crash of two other known hijacked aircraft into the WTC, and a missing third, being covered on every radio and television station in the country. "In order to perform this bit of electronic navigation, he would have to be very familiar with (Instrument Flight Rules) procedures. None of these fellows (the alleged hijackers) even knew what a navigational chart looked like, or even how to plug frequencies into NAV/COM radios, much less input information into flight management computers (FMC) and engage LNAV (lateral navigation automated mode). If one is to believe the official story, all of this was supposedly accomplished by raw student pilots while flying blind at 500 MPH over unfamiliar (and practically invisible) terrain, using complex methodologies and employing sophisticated instruments."

And more on this aerial daredevil!

In late 1996, hijacker Hani Hanjour attends CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Arizona for three months. This is normally adequate time to earn a private pilot’s certificate, but Hanjour fails to accomplish this. [Los Angeles Times, 9/27/2001] Duncan Hastie, the school’s owner, finds Hanjour a “weak student” who is “wasting our resources.” According to Hastie, “He was not able to fly solo in a small plane, which is equivalent to getting out of a parking space [in a car] and stopping.” Hanjour returns to CRM in December 1997 with two friends: Bandar Al Hazmi, a Saudi like Hanjour, and Rayed Abdullah of Qatar. Hanjour takes about three lessons, but still fails to complete the coursework necessary for a license to fly a single-engine aircraft. Subsequently, he phones the school about twice per year requesting more lessons, but, according to Hastie, “We didn’t want him back at our school because he was not serious about becoming a good pilot.” The final time Hanjour calls, in 2000, he requests training on a Boeing 757: the kind of plane he is alleged to have flown into the Pentagon on 9/11.

At the next flight school Hanjour will attend in early 2001, the staff will be so appalled at his lack of skills that they will repeatedly contact the FAA and ask them to investigate how he got a pilot’s license (see January-February 2001). After 9/11, the FBI will appear to investigate how Hanjour got his license and question and polygraph the instructor who signed off on his flying skills. The Washington Post will note that, since Hanjour’s pilot skills were so bad, the issue of how he was able to get a license “remains a lingering question that FAA officials refuse to discuss.”

Hani Hanjour practices on a Boeing 737-200 simulator for a total of 21 hours at the JetTech International flight school in Phoenix, Arizona. Hanjour also attends ground school and pays just under $7,500 for the training. Despite only completing 21 of his originally scheduled 34 hours of simulator training, according to the FBI this is the best-trained of the four hijacker pilots (see Spring-Summer 2001). However, an instructor comments: “Student made numerous errors during performance… including a lack of understanding of some basic concepts… Some of the concepts involved in large jet systems cannot be fully comprehended by someone with only small prop plane experience.”

9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour goes to the Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland, about 20 miles west of Washington. He wants to rent a single engine Cessna airplane. However, when two instructors take him on three test runs, they find he has trouble controlling and landing the plane. One instructor has to help him land. Due to his poor skills, therefore, he is not allowed to rent one of their planes without more lessons

Phone call was made 10/26/06 to the NTSB to get answers based on the Flight Data Recorder information/animation they provided of American Airlines Flight 77. AA77 was reported to have struck the Pentagon and is in direct conflict with the official story of striking down light poles on its path to impact. The actual flight path shown in the animation based on the Flight Data Recorder also conflicts with the physical damage on the ground. Here is what the NTSB had to say...

This is the final maneuver performed by the aircraft which hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 according to the govt story. This animation was provided by the NTSB and is accurate in terms of the flight data recorder on board this aircraft. It has not been altered by anyone after it was received from the NTSB. Whether or not this animation is authentic, i defer inquiry to the NTSB. Please pay attention to the end of the video, as the altitude is too high to have hit the light poles that were reported to have been struck by the same aircraft which hit the pentagon. The video comment inserts are provided by an experienced Airline pilot.

After reading the facts about Hanjour's dismal attempts to pilot small, single-engine prop planes, do you really think he could pilot one of the world's largest and most complicated aircraft into the Pentagon, like the picture below shows what altitude he would of been flying in order to hit the building?

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